Many companies today collect large quantities of information about their business. Information relating to financial data, inventory, personnel, workflow, productivity, and countless other aspects of a company's business can be collected and stored in databases, data warehouses, or other data management systems for subsequent retrieval and analysis. For example, a company's finance department may track and maintain information related to revenues, profits, projected and actual budgets, operating costs, cash flow, payroll, and the like.
The business data gathered by a company may be aggregated and organized for viewing in a variety of different formats. Examples of such formats may include tables, spreadsheets, diagrams, portals, shared network drives, intranet pages, and the like. The information presented in these formats may often be summarized or distilled down into smaller, more manageable sets of information that can be analyzed for various purposes. Using the finance department example, a finance manager may be interested in viewing the company's monthly spending reports for the current year as compared to the corresponding reports from the previous year. This information may be gathered from one or more financial databases, formatted into a table or another appropriate format, and presented to the finance manager for review.
One type of business portal that may be used to display a company's business information is known as a digital dashboard. Digital dashboards can present a single graphical interface to show different types of information pulled from a number of different internal and/or external resources. For example, a digital dashboard may be used to request information from a backend system that stores operating costs, and to locate information in a separate relational database that contains revenue information, and both the operating cost information and the revenue information can be displayed to a financial analyst via the dashboard.